AMD pushes into the Chromebook market with its new A-Series of processors

Chromebooks have experienced a boom over the past few years, seeing close to an 8 percent annual growth rate. AMD believes that its competition is “underserving the performance of the market,” deciding to make its own push by introducing A4 and A6-powered Chromebooks.

Intel has dominated the Chromebook market since its 2011 inception, with the duo-core Celeron N3350 and the quad-core Pentium N4200 being the two most common processors in models from the past two years. AMD’s new A4-9120C is compared with the former throughout internal testing, while the more premium A6-9220C is stacked against the latter.

AMD declares that both the A4 and the A6 edge out competition in almost every area, with up to 23% faster web browsing according to Speedometer 2.0 readings and and web applications processing up to 13% faster in Webxprt 3. Using PCMark for Android Work, AMD pushes out more impressive figures with emails loading up to 2.5 times faster, productivity bolstered by up to 63% and supposedly 33% faster photo editing and gaming. It is worth noting that these devices are not explicitly designed for the latter at just 6W across both duo-core processors, with internal tests limited to browser and Play Store games.

These are some impressive comparisons, but benchmarks can only take technology so far. During his 6 weeks with the device, senior technical marketing manager for AMD’s client business unit Robert Hallock stated that the company’s new Chromebook served him well, with at least 10 hours of battery life and the ability to handle H.264 and H.265 encoding. This will be a set standard across all of AMD’s upcoming Chromebooks.

AMD’s push into Chromebooks is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the company’s latest mobile efforts, with second-generation Ryzen processors covering every area of the notebook market. These will be fully showcased during CES next week.

KitGuru Says: It’s worth remaining sceptical of internal figures until third-parties get their hands on the notebooks for testing. Still, it’s worth waiting a little while longer if you are in the market for a new Chromebook, as AMD’s line-up looks promising.